Wings
by ryrous
Summary: Mags has lived a long time, but she's never seen this


Finnick seems to think Mags is indestructible.

Granted, she had never given him reason to think otherwise, never really done anything to suggest she was anything other than the cunning old lady she wanted to be. He looks up to her, she knows. After all, wasn't it because of her he had lived, because of her Annie still breathed? She knows all these things and she knows she's done them, but a part of her still wants someone to call her something other than brave and honorable.

_Brave_. They'd used that word first back when 17 year old Magarity Touse was reaped for the sixth Hunger Games. Mags has never been one for words, she finds them too lacking or misleading. _You can't express in ink what's already been written in blood_, her mother told her once, not that Mags had listened.

Or maybe she had listened, but it didn't matter anyway. Mags' days were not for cryptic thoughts murmured over clinking knitting needles. She had no time for riddles when she could instead feel the slip or water on her skin or make fun of the neighbor boy who didn't like fish. He too, would call her brave. Everyone would, even her mother, who was supposed to be on such bad terms with adjectives, would brand her with it and other words like it.

Mags the brave, Mags the honorable, Mags the clever. All these her district labeled her, but the only thing she knows for sure is that she's certainly Mags the _old._

Was it honorable when she slit that eleven year old's throat as he slept? No, there were other words on her conscience now. Something along the lines of _heartless_ or _unfair_.

But no, in District 4 mercy became a thing to be spat at, and Mags? Nobody had blamed her for the blood she swam through when she returned from the games, though she sometimes wishes they had.

_Mags the Brave, be her._

Mags the Brave beat the heart out of Annie Cresta, or tried to. There was no place in the Hunger Games for words like _sweet_ or _kind_, not if you didn't want an axe in your head, she had thought, but Annie had ended up with an axe in her head anyway, if only a metaphorical one. It breaks Mags' heart. She has done what she was supposed to, she has brought Annie back as she brought back Finnick, but there is not a speck of her that presumes to think she has saved them.

Mags has lived a long time, and she has never bothered much with ideas of revolution, but there is something in the eyes of the girl from District 12 that gives Mags pause, an intangible ghost of a thing perhaps but a _thing _nonetheless. What it is, she can't quite decide.

It takes until the circus show of interviews before she puts her finger on it. The white dress burns up and with it burns the yoke the capitol has put on her as Katniss Everdeen becomes a Mockingjay before her eyes

"She's got wings," Mags says to Finnick, who sees the twinkle in his mentor's eye and knows it means everything in the world.

The Mockingjay can save them, she feels it as she has never felt anything before. Looking at Katniss Everdeen, Mags feels hopeful, and Mags feels old.

_Kindness has no place in the games_.

She sees now how wrong she was, how broken she's been all her life. The Girl on Fire would win, and lead them all out of the arena Mags has never truly left. For the first time, Magarity Touse will _not_ play.

Finnick has insisted that they would both make it through the 75th Hunger Games, but he doesn't understand that Mags has no place in District 13 or anywhere, she belongs to the Capitol and all their atrocities, and you can't fly away when you haven't got wings.

She doesn't even pause when she feels Finnick's strength faltering. The Baker's Boy and the Girl on Fire are her deliverance, they atone for the people Mags has lost and the countless others she has damaged. If she can help save them, she has saved Panem and that, Mags thought, was _certainly_ a worthy cause. She lets go of Finnick and thinks that maybe somebody, somewhere, would remember what she died for, instead of how she lived. As she slips from Finnick's back, Mags the Brave is unafraid for the very first time.

Years later when the name Magarity Touse is mentioned, it is in song. When the schoolchildren sing of her sacrifice, it is of _Mags the Kind._


End file.
